


i’ve projected you in costumes i don’t think were quite your size

by derogatory



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-18
Updated: 2015-06-18
Packaged: 2018-04-04 22:31:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4155438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/derogatory/pseuds/derogatory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five women Lon'qu can stand to be around<br/>or<br/>Five times Lon'qu saw himself in the future kids</p>
            </blockquote>





	i’ve projected you in costumes i don’t think were quite your size

**Author's Note:**

  * For [warfare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/warfare/gifts).



i.  
Chrom's child stood before them grounded in her explanations with royal posture and wartime bearing, but Basilio won't hear it. The future in the present sounds like messy business, the Khan proudly declares, but still ushers one pair onto his makeshift training fields. As her employer, he insists on meeting any child of Olivia's- past, present or future. Lon'qu, bound in loyalty and disdain for predestination, has stuck close to grounds in an effort to avoid the newest Shepherds and greets this forced intrusion of their renewed war efforts with low, unfocused suspicion.

Olivia anxiously taps out a rhythm with her heels while the Khan addresses the young man, his fingers threaded to his mother's. His champion is not watching them, they're simply in his line of vision while he repairs the training axes. Eventually Basilio dismisses the woman; she can stand by to watch them spar, but she must promise not to be overwhelmed with motherly worry. 

Lon'qu maintains an acceptable distance while Olivia approaches him and rounds up to speak, a labored full body exercise.

"He adores Basilio." When her words first reach the air it's a flurried mess, more a mad dash than a dance. It's indelicate and sloppy and Lon'qu vastly prefers it to her other movements. Olivia takes a few gulps of air in relief; the first few words are the toughest, the rest comes with more ease. "I think he likes him more than his own father." She stutters back into silence, belatedly realizing the slight in her observation. Her husband is unnoticeable as ever and Lon'qu grimly observes that even if the man had be lurking unseen, it's unlikely to damage an already shattered confidence. 

"Basilio is superior to many men," he replies, eyes focused downward. She lingers, unsteady to the tips of her fingernails. 

Robin has a keen eye for strategy and camaraderie and somehow hones in on the surest path through a war zone, the slightest needs of a teammate. Lon'qu has watched him target an enemy's defense as well as a friend's quiet nuance. He doesn't imagine both are particularly necessary for a champion's line of work, but years of their Khan pushing them together has given him some insight to when Olivia, with concerted effort, wishes to talk but lacks the words.

"Perhaps he will recruit your son after this war," he manages, reluctantly coming to the floundering girl's rescue. "For the fighting pits." He gags at the effort it took, the monotony of small talk. 

"Yes, maybe," she says, breathless, solitary fingers wound together in worry. Basilio roars triumphantly when the boy is disarmed before hurriedly tossing him another weapon, eager for round two. Lon'qu sees his mother in the boy's smile, a muscle-deep desire to please. It's just as nauseating far away as it is up close, in men as it is in women. 

"Or as a dancer," his mother considers wryly when Inigo is disarmed again in four seconds flat. Her voice comes easier the longer they speak, though Lon'qu's tolerance runs thinner. "I'm not sure. He's a little shy like you."

Lon'qu affixes her with a withering look, and the twinge in his throat is probably a cold- hopefully something deadly- certainly not guilt for when her expression seized in concern. The boy who was disarmed for a fourth time now is doing little to raise Lon'qu's opinion of him, not that his thoughts mean much regarding trivial matters such as temporary temporal shift teammates. These new Shepherds are just that- temporary nuisances, and any similarities Olivia's spots are clearly mistaken. Fifth time disarmed, her son is little more than his needy grabs for attention mired in womanizing and poor stances. Although the slums were hardly a bastion of socialization and good manners, Lon'qu has the forethought not to voice any of this aloud.

Olivia laughs, a quick tinkling burst. He wore his reaction poorly.

"You know what I mean," she smiles, bashful. He doesn't. "It's um. Something Robin taught me once. I think you're both very shy but brave. Do you understand?" He doesn't. They lapse into preferable silence, or as much as their Khan and her overeager son would allow.

  


* * *

  


ii.  
"Who asked you to retrieve all of these?" Lon'qu growls, shifting the bundles of baked goods in his arms. The syrupy smell is already making his teeth ache.

Cherche peeks over her own share of treats. "Nobody asked, I thought it would be a helpful sugary pick-me-up." Her husband's poor traits are contagious and Lon'qu angles the cakes away from himself. The final third of the cakes are packaged carefully and carried in a parcel that hangs from Minerva's mouth as she dutifully trots beside them. He doesn't care for sweet things, but imagines even in starvation he wouldn't partake from that bundle of sugar and wyvern saliva.

"And then you required my help so you could appear helpful?"

"Truly, and I'll take all the credit for it so your reputation as a misanthrope will remain intact." She beams and the sun beats warm on their shoulders and he thinks maybe he can hear Minerva purring. Lon'qu shifts the parcels in his arms, checking he can still reach his sword speedily enough. Threats lurk in moments of peace.

"Although I may have overreached a little this time," she confesses, sheepishly looking over arms full enough to feed the Shepherds twice over.

"That was foolish of you," Lon'qu sniffs, considers this. He glances at her sideways. "You're not normally a foolish woman."

"Such flattery," she grins behind the brown wrappings and twine. "Don't forget, I'm a married woman." Minerva hisses angrily when Lon'qu sputters and hurriedly establishes clearer boundaries, forced space, road be damned. "Oh, no! I'm only teasing, please don't drop anymore cakes, I'm sorry." Cherche stifles a laugh, coaxing the skeptical champion out of the brambles. "You're right, it was foolish. I just needed some air."

Lon'qu glowers until she backs away further. "You have a wyvern , a flight on her seems air enough."

It's her turn to look at him sideways. "You're particularly literal today," she notes. Satisfied with the radius between them, they lumber forward, burdened with the weight of their packages, the heavy pound of beastly steps. The sun reflecting off Minerva's scales begins to give him a headache.

"He also has a wyvern," she speaks again, quieter and nearly lost under her larger friend's indignant huff. She smiles softly, an apology, and the creature none to gently clips Lon'qu's shoulder when it takes off into the air. He is not overly fond of mounts.

"That's also a bit why I asked you to come with me." Cherche is ladylike to a fault, made even more so by the other feminine members of their party. She doesn't need layers of silk and gentle hands to cut deep with her offensive femininity. A generous and affable member to the Shepherds; she's not without her tricks. Her patience and compassion hide a stranglehold grip, pinning him underneath the fires of beasts and burning his outline into the dirt. Lon'qu immediately considers grinding every pasty under his heel.

"You remind me of him a little," she starts, slow and sweet in this vulnerable confession. There's more hesitation than usual, the lack of familiarity she gladly bestows on comrades who don't share her own bloodline. He'd prefer to be immolated. "My son." 

Lon'qu is aware Cherche and her husband have a son who wears a mask and talks to no one but his companions from the future. The exchanges Lon'qu had the misfortune of overhearing bare little beyond that her son exhibits minimum attachments to both the doomed future or potentially doomed present. Laid out flat, Lon'qu has to admit that makes the boy with the wyvern preferable to the others, if he has to have a stance on the noisy future kin.

She glances to the warrior for confirmation to continue, Lon'qu sincerely hopes she spots the agony in his eyes. She goes on, overly complimentary in her comparisons, "He's taciturn and difficult and stubborn." Lon'qu's not sure when they stopped walking. He furiously stares at a point in the sky where Minerva darts through the clouds. This tactic is the emotional manipulation of women, a part of him seethes, but it feels largely untrue lately. It's something more sour than anger that creeps up his throat from the pit in his chest. The need to be useful, to serve a purpose to this person who has fought alongside you. He knows what Cherche needs from him, but she should be smart enough to know he isn't capable of it, whatever fabricated similarities she sees between him and her distant child.

"I want very much for him to like me," she confesses, softer still, lost almost under the wyvern's shriek in the distance, like some monstrous affirmation.

Lon'qu shrugs, dismissive. "You are his mother, children naturally adore their parents." He assumes and sees no point on elaborating about things he never had, certainties that must exist for the lucky. They are incredibly lucky- This boy has his mother again; Cherche has some insight into her family's future. Naga has blessed them and it's their own failing if they remain blind to it. These are things he only half believes, blessings he pretends to count. It is impossible to miss something you never knew. Sentimentality leaves a strange taste in his mouth.

"No," she breathes and the wyvern over them circles, doubles back, and Lon'qu wonders if the beasts sense their masters' distress or simply have good hearing. "No, parents do not die and leave their children alone in a world we made terrible-"

"Parents die and leave their children alone in every world," he snaps. "You're taking his nature too personally." Cherche pinches her mouth into a thin line and even when he's turned from her, he can tell when she looks away as well. She's not angry, the anger of women is something he can stomach from an acceptable distance. Loss and sadness are different, especially in women, and it curdles within him, every airy sigh. 

He's started to grind his teeth. "I don't think your son and I are alike at all."

"No?" In the corner of his eye he has the misfortune of spotting her smile but it doesn't align with her other features- Stiff shoulders under armor, a forehead creased with worry. The midday sun feels warmer each time Minerva soars past, leaving a fleeting shade in her wake.

"No," he repeats, resolute. "You and I have had to work long, difficult hours to allow this much contact. But he was born indebted to you and still holds a child's love for you. I can see this."

Cherche makes a weak, strangled noise in her throat and Lon'qu is sure an arrow pierced it, that this moment of peace has come to a crashing halt and again he has ruined everything. But there's no injury beyond over-sentimentality and when the woman reaches out for him in blind compassion, Lon'qu drops every last pastry.

"Oh well," she reasons sadly when no amount of elbow work can dust off the dirt from both their fumbled shares. "The cakes are done for. I suppose we'll lie and say it was an ambush so no one's too disappointed."

  


* * *

  


iii.  
She delicately walks her fingers along Lon'qu's arm, her movements arduously slow, murmuring a scale from a song he hasn't heard before. He stares firmly ahead, hoping sheer force of will can keep the goosebumps at bay.

"You're gonna make him break out in a rash you keep that up," her husband warns, leaning against one of the tent's support poles.

"Oh posh, that was one time," Maribelle rolls her eyes, keening in closer to her student, ignoring the warning turn of Lon'qu's mouth. "Your posture is lovely," she whispers, smirking as Vaike hurriedly tries to straighten himself from his earlier slump. Pleased, she slips back to the song.

"Once was enough. Stop singing." The noblewoman arches thin eyebrow at Lon'qu's stilted order. "Please." Satisfied, she falls quiet, her mouth to a pinprick grin, tiny fingers tracing incisions along his skin. He's not sure why such an attack hasn't left scars, considering how often he's allowed it under the guise of "training."

He snaps his arm away on a reflex, and feels cold sweat. Maribelle takes a delighted observation of the time, a new record, says her mewling respect. Vaike tosses his arms in the air, slinking from one end of the enclosure to another, pacing with a lion's turn.

"Man, c'mon. You're breaking Teach's heart!" he pleads. "A Feroxi champion brought down by my lil woman."

"Is that so surprising?" she smirks, gracefully turning to him. "I brought you to your knees in half this."

"Yeah, you did." he says, voice thick.

"Don't," Lon'qu croaks, snapping the two from another dreaded moment of public affection.

Pink cheeked, Maribelle hurriedly pats her hands over her curls. "Speaking of wedded bliss," she begins, voice somewhat louder than necessary. "Surely your wife can accomplish these little women-tolerating exercises." She bristles in her own notion of being unnecessary. "I hardly see what you need me for."

Vaike whistles low and long. "Woo, lookit her, fishing for compliments. He lets you torture him cause he's your friend. Ain't that right buddy?"

At Lon'qu's stiff nod, Maribelle's hands flutter to her chest, delighted no matter how many times he allows himself to admit it. Her attention is taxing, every batted eyelash turn turning his stomach along with it. He recoils from every prim posture and doll-like pose and she tiptoes after him, her gloved hand reaching after his crawling skin. Maribelle offends in more than her careless way of speaking, her cutting observations of the lesser class. But she pours hours into her efforts to better herself in their eyes, and with clenched nerves Lon'qu has to admit it makes her a fair teacher, a useful acquaintance.

("Bosom friends," she remarked one terrible afternoon, voice dripping with adoration. Lon'qu broke out in a full body fever.)

"Oh, don't fuss!" she cries in dismay when Lon'qu struggles away from her musician fingers and frills. "Darling, no, you were doing so well," she mourns, reaching after him, the smudge on his cheek. There are seconds where her perfume overpowers him like a mage's attack and he drowns in her simpering concern. She has coupled the irrational healing kindness of her role with the lofty feminine wiles of her status and it is overwhelming compassionate and smug in its docility.

"Hey," her husband calls, stalking to perform the most tragic of rescues, batting Maribelle's hands aside. "Don't be babyin' him!" She fixes him with a cold stare that only years of warrior discipline have steeled her husband against. Mostly. Vaike twists his back to her, catching his friend in his sights. "'Cept now that the Vaike thinks about it... He kinda reminds me of a certain baby." Marriage into high society has made another desperate instructor no more clever than before, but made Vaike interminably arrogant in a variety of new methods.

"Don't call him a baby, he's very sensitive," she snaps, tossing her hair over a shoulder.

"uh, which? Lon'qu or our baby?"

"Both," she declares and brightens immediately when Lon'qu glares. "Oh, see! Look, they have the same little pout. I knew when Brady arrived I'd seen it before," she coos and Lon'qu withers under the glowing parental stares. "How perfectly sweet he is."

"That so?" Vaike leers, leaning in close enough the champion imagines the myriad of ways he could throttle him. "Looks like being partners with you has finally paid off! Got practice bein' a dad thanks to your sourpuss." He casts a long, low look towards his wife. "Bet there are some other things we can practice when it comes to makin babies."

Only recently upgraded to Sage, her reaction time still isn't fast enough to spot her husband darting beside her. Maribelle manages a short, happy shriek as he scoops her up in a flourish of skirts and tiny shoes kicking into the air.

"We will continue our work tomorrow!" she calls as she's carried away, Vaike's face buried at her throat. "Do not forget your homework again or I shall be very cross with you, darling- oh!"

Skin still burning from where she held him, Lon'qu tries to crease his mouth from a smile.

  


* * *

  


iv.  
"You're bein' creepy," the patient calls at the skulking figure who should've been out of eye shot. Lon'qu stalks under the canvas, into the light of the med tent to meet her knowing grin with a scowl. Lissa rolls her eyes, or at least one not obscured by a bandage wrapped the full length of her forehead. He wonders if she knows one of her pigtails is undone. "Geez," she mutters, waving the champion closer with a small wince. "Everybody's been making that face at me, but I think it looks weirdest on you."

"I'm not making a face," he protests. He casts a wary glance through the tent, past the other injured. "Where is your husband?"

"Robin convinced him and Owain to get something to eat." She yawns. "Did you bring me something to eat? I'm starving." Lon'qu shakes his head. "Just came by to check on me, huh?"

"No," he counters boldly. His palms flex and he's eager to rearm himself. The camp has clearly gone to pieces at the mere notion of Lissa's mortality and it would be an opportune time for the enemy to take advantage of such chaos. It was a mistake to come. "I was merely walking by."

"You were creeping and spying on me, you weirdo," she presses triumphantly. While Lon'qu stands stock still, her expression falls, glancing after the lamplight that darts across the room. The sounds of the camp gently waft past the tent. "Lots of other people stopped by." Lon'qu shrugs; she is the Princess, she was gravely injured. Who wouldn't stop to pay their concerns? "Must've been a bad fight. I don't really remember it." Lissa absently winds her fingers in the blanket, too thick for a summer battle, but a necessity so the royal does not catch a chill, even with such humidity. Frederick clearly stopped by. 

"It was a battle. You're alive," Lon'qu says, voice short. 

"Wow, you really know how to paint a picture," she retorts. Unlike the overzealous knight, he doesn't have to wait for a dismissal from the royal, but he feels his legs stuck to the spot like the waist-deep muds in the mire. Lissa was so small, a deeper patch could've enveloped her entirely, drowned her in the swamps when she fell. 

"It went poorly," Lon'qu admits, staring at a fixed shadow on the canvas. "You were lucky those kids came." Your son, he wants to say but it's twisted in his throat, strangled and sharp. Lissa has no son, they could each have no future if they were to have died in battle today. Some promise of a future family is irrelevant when you're fighting. A person can't get caught up in the hope for some future bonds or they risk severing their present ones.

"So lucky," she chirps and Lon'qu pushes down the warmth from when she smiles. "Guess I got a permanent bodyguard now, huh? He talks more than you."

Lon'qu grunts. 

"Exactly," Lissa laughs and flinches, hands grasping at her bandaged side. As if on cue to her distress, there's a flurry of crows and Lon'qu isn't sure what he despises more in her husband; his high laugh or his poor timing for these showy flourishes. 

"You're up!" he cries, bearing dinner rolls for the hungry patient. "All the visitors you can hang out with and you pick this guy?" he sniggers, throwing himself onto the cot that tries its best to support the weight of two. Lon'qu angles himself away from the Plegian lunatic, feeling any previous bond of loyalty severing with his unwelcome appearance. Lissa, quite the opposite, gladly loops her arm in Henry's, who clearly pretends not to notice his wife's wince.

"Everybody was so worried," he declares, as if the mortality of his beloved was something to hold as a personal accomplishment. "But Lissa's not allowed to die without me. Then they will bury us side by side until the worms eat our eyes."

"See, Lon'qu, that's how you paint a picture," she notes with a shudder.

He exits quick enough he nearly runs into the boy waiting outside the tent. Lon'qu opens his mouth to tell him off, his hand creasing into a fist to knock the boy out of his way, when Henry's voice cuts through the sounds of the camp.

"You were dead," he says and Lissa hushes back refusals. "Dead and bloody, all that blood." The boy twists uncomfortably in the unseen space between him and his parents, uncharacteristically quiet. That's the only trait Lon'qu's noticed since this one arrived in their camp, their time; Loud. He wishes they'd all be louder now, so he can avoid her husband's empty whimpering. "I didn't like it."

Lon'qu retreats to the training grounds that are silent since Basilio's death. He practices until his heartbeat pounds in his ears, his breath harsh and loud to drown out the ringing quiet.

Lying to women is a necessity. They are frail and cursed with weak hearts and irritating cries. It's better to misconstrue, to avoid difficult truths, although he's not entirely sure which part of that conversation had been a lie. Possibly all of it.

The battle went worse than poorly, there were additional makeshift triages just outside Lissa's reach, with their own huddled masses of weeping comrades, uncharacteristically quiet or unnerved by bloodshed. But for every fresh grave there were grateful loved ones and newly sharpened blades. They would simply have to fight better, train more. It was a battle, there's hardly any other way to describe it, even if you were a snickering Plegian child with a penchant for gory prose. 

The children had taken the lead when the initial charges had fallen and injuries pushed some of the troops into a panic. It had been thanks to them Lissa hadn't bled out in the mud, but Lon'qu can't shake off the dread that their appearance had been 'lucky.' There was nothing lucky about shifting reality to serve their purpose. These children had taken the lead and suddenly taken too much, like locusts on their own time frame moving onto devour the past. 

He wasn't just walking by her tent.

Lon'qu trains until the camp finally goes quiet and dark, and can feel his daughter's eyes burning into his back.

  


* * *

  


v.  
No matter how many questions the group is peppered with, or the years they claim to have experienced in this unknowable and dire future, the person calling herself his daughter is no girl. She is a woman because she must be, because a girl is the child they haven't raised, is the baby that hasn't been born, hasn't even been a conversation her apparent parents have had, not even in peacetime.

Noire stands shaky and unsure beside familiar looking strangers and calls him Father when he hasn't imagined that for himself yet, let alone earned the title.

His wife lets her head loll against her shoulders while she considers this new development, slow smirks in the face of her future fertility. She tests the title out slowly, then defiantly, and swoops over the frightened girl in an instant, repeating 'Mother' over and over until Lon'qu isn't sure it's not a curse.

Robin detangles them after a few days, assigns Noire to her father with slow glances over his book. Lon'qu shifts under the stare between them, the coaxing smile in the strategist's eyes. He doesn't ask if the Feroxi warrior will be all right with the arrangement. There can be no room for error in their new-found wartime, in family. Still- Lon'qu thinks this new Morgan woman stares for too long, his skin itches.

Noire is small and sickly, smart but slow. She takes direction easily and fires arrows straight, but flinches at crowds and drops her eyes when spoken to. Lon'qu observes this but doesn't feel he's in a position to lecture. That is the role of a father (he assumes, he has no experience of one himself). Tharja agrees, the girl's father should discipline her. Her consonants hang between them. But her father is dead and buried in the future, all their fathers are, as these future hauntings remind them at every turn. Their parents are dead and we are incomplete copies, standing in for future shortcomings.

Vaike shrugs, it's weird but what're you gonna do? Kids need parents, we need to win. It's that simple.

"You gotta step up," the warrior beams, clapping a free hand against Lon'qu's shoulder while the other reacts purely on instinct, its axe cutting through the Risen beside them. "So what if our kids are a little wimpy."

More than a little, Lon'qu grimaces at every one of her coughs, her hesitance. She is the embodiment of the fragility of women, the hard learned truths his wife untwisted for him over time. Tharja broke those beliefs with her hands out-splayed against the darkness, calling her own and never wavering. She is strong. Every spell his wife takes to the chest, every skeleton straight stance that never breaks, and every crisp laugh that cuts through the screams of battle confirms this. Noire does not take after her mother. She is a weak child and she is so because her father- you- are weak and even with her mother's strength, your presence in the lives of women does nothing but drag them to defeat. The resignation is a nostalgic dread he doesn't welcome back, but it returns like its own future ghost. The tremble of her hands exhausts him.

It can't be helped. Noire is grown and battle proven; there is no changing a person that late in life. ("You changed," Robin hums and Lon'qu ignores.) He can do what he must to keep her safe, but he cannot undo whatever future failings he will be guilty for as a father. All that's left is to prevent them from happening in this life, he resolves.

As with most things, his wife takes it poorly. 

Tharja curses him still and lofts over his futile attempts to buck her away, a cold hand caressing his forehead. Don't you love me anymore, a weaker woman may have asked after days of his avoidance, his cold return to bad habits. Instead, she doesn't ask or accuse, but knows by reading it along his bones and under her teeth. His wife is strong and completely terrifying. 

"The you and I who exist in this world will have our progeny," she vows. "Avoiding me won't change that. Your fears are meaningless."

"I'm not afraid," he snarls through a locked jaw. She bites. It was a long few days.

Noire's smile between their attacks is tense, guarded. Lon'qu cannot afford to give her a father's attention, they are immersed in a battle. Robin refuses to make the same mistakes again. Their movements are more cohesive now, less room for error and weakness. Their strategist commends his own daughter for her natural aptitude for war with a thin smile. Morgan is eager to please; Noire seems destined to disappoint, withdrawing for the med tent after the first skirmish.

"I won't ask you to retreat with me," she wheezes and Lon'qu assesses the tiny form. There are no outward injuries, no attacks against her he hadn't parried. Her face is pale and drawn but without pain. Lon'qu feels a pressure headache building between his eyes; she pushed herself too hard on their march yesterday. Clearly if Noire inherited anything at all from her mother it was her inability to heed sensible advice.

"You won't go un-escorted," he snaps and there's an explosion of pain at her timid acquiescence. If she chooses to be spineless, it would've done their group a service to choose so twenty four hours ago, instead of fatiguing herself. Or to stand up to an unworthy man who has done nothing but donate the weakest of traits, to doom her to a life of infirmity. Of course her father died in some distant future, likely being as useless to the women there as he has always been. Noire is a sickening mirror of every fault he muddles through and Lon'qu blinks spots out of his eyes, staggering forward. The explosion of pain wasn't a visceral reaction to his self-loathing; he was struck in the back by enemy archers.

On one knee, he belatedly realizes it's necessary to comfort children, if that's what she was. He opens his mouth to console the too gentle woman, but he can't raise his voice over the sound, the low roar from a place he doesn't recognize. No, he recognizes it, but Tharja is across the sea, and even in her vilest spells she would never raise her voice so loudly- why are all these children so _loud_? There's no spell within Noire's cry, the easy twist of her wrist that meets the attacker's arrows square at their centers, splitting them to the root. In the time it takes him to blink the Risen drop from their horses, similarly run through.

"Well," Noire rounds on him and he misses the girlish shiver between her shoulders. Her eyes are narrowed and lips curled thin in distaste when she snaps, "What's wrong with you? A couple measly arrows? Aren't you supposed to be a champion?" An angry, unkind laughter dances across her features before it drops completely, like a stone into the water and she fumbles with the bow through her shaking. "Is it-- Were they poisoned? Oh, Father! I've failed you again-"

"No," he grunts, slouching back to his feet. Blood makes his shirt stick to his skin of his back. "I'll escort you to the infirmary now."

Thaja returns smelling like saltwater and sweeps over them like the waves. Lon'qu watches her closely, careful to see if she removes any hex bags from their daughter's clothing or casts any blood magic with her bandaged wounds. That sudden strength descended like a curse, rolled over his stammering daughter like her mother does to any opposition. Noire's moods shift like the snapping of a bowstring wound too tight but Lon'qu can't place the blame with either his or her mother's traits. The children have made themselves into something without us, wholly self-sufficient, regardless of cross time comparisons. He watches the young group with less distrust, although with renewed ire that they are all still entirely too loud.

"I see you've made peace with the spectre of our offspring." Tharja catches him staring and sneers, but her husband isn't so sure. He's slow to accept peace, least of all when it involves dismissing his own failures. 

For each of her inherited weaknesses, Noire has a sunken fury that shudders through their ranks. His daughter is her mother when it matters, strong and terrifying. Each time Noire goes on a tirade, Lon'qu grimly wonders if this will be easier or harder when she is a baby.


End file.
